This exploratory study explores the potential contexts and opportunities for emerging visual data in urban forest design. Forestry experts deploy drone-mounted digital sensors to capture detailed visual and spatial data urban vegetation. These sensors generate point clouds that not only inform ecological analysis but also visually construct urban environments from a pedestrian perspective. Even though many data sources and visualisation tools such as GIS are available, how visualised data should be integrated into design practice is still unclear. Using a prototype multi-sourced data visualisation, we conducted eight semi-structured interviews with urban forestry experts to elicit reflections of the analytical and cultural roles of data visualisations in the domain. Thematic analysis of the interview transcripts revealed three design-oriented themes: (1) design analysis, (2) public engagement, and (3) sustainability. By analysing expert reflections, this paper considers potential research directions for visualising social and ecological data as a design material in the built environment. We discuss the implications of such visualisations for the broader community of spatial planning research including urban designers and communication scholars, proposing future research directions that leverage visual data to better design evolving urban landscapes.

With the near-ubiquitous presence of smartphones among urban dwellers in many parts of the world, we are living in an age where the public can act as continuous sensors of urban spaces. As such, data collected from GPS sensors in phones are particularly suited to support understanding human spatial behaviors in cities, and their potential for societal monitoring has been much anticipated. Yet, the field is still emerging and practical steps for utilizing smartphone-GPS in human behavior research remain unclear. Over a decade after the introduction of smartphones, we review the use of GPS data collected by these devices (smartphone-GPS data) as a tool for researching human behavior in cities. Using methods and findings from 96 papers that investigate human behaviors using smartphone-GPS data, we present seven application themes that describe domains where these data have been used thus far: sports and physical activity, environmental conditions, health and wellbeing, places and movement, neighborhoods and society, tourism, and single amenity use. We also describe the methodological factors, including parameters and variables, that have shaped how researchers have used smartphone-GPS data to understand relationships between pedestrian-scale human behaviors and urban environments. Based on these findings, we make recommendations for future researchers using smartphone-GPS data to understand relationships between humans and urban environments, at the pedestrian scale.